ELDERS AND TRANSACTIONAL RELATIONSHIPS IN SIERRA LEONE: RETHINKING SYNCHRONIC APPROACHES - MPG.PURE
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Africa 90 (4) 2020: 701–20 doi:10.1017/S0001972020000285
Elders and transactional relationships in Sierra
Leone: rethinking synchronic approaches
Luisa T. Schneider
Introduction
I am sitting under the canopy that connects the two huts that serve as kitchen and parlour
for the staff of King George’s home for the elderly in Freetown, Sierra Leone. Aunty
Kadie, one of the home’s staff, cleans fish with quick and routinized movements. A
group of residents gather in the shade. They have come to teach me – the anthropologist
who is interested in relationship forms – about agreements (transactional relationships).
The elders explain that, while the importance of marriages is undisputed, agreements are
too often ignored, even though such relationships are key for forging and maintaining
social connections, experiencing intimacy and bypassing loneliness. Their knowledge
about how to navigate agreement relationships, they say, makes them invaluable teachers
for younger generations, who, like them, depend on agreements for success. After listen-
ing for a while, Aunty Kadie bursts into laughter and then goes on to say: ‘You talk about
company but don’t forget that these agreements you have, you have them just as much to
get a full stomach. Look at that fish I am cleaning here, that fish was brought by Pa Jones’
“agreement”. He is in it for the fish.’ With a smile, Pa Boima (aged sixty-three) responds
by saying: ‘One does not oppose the other. They are for both – for income and for rela-
tions. The world is changing fast. Sometimes, families are broken up. People move all
over. Much is needed to survive and provide. Many people cannot take care of their
parents when they are old. When we are widowed, we are on our own or sent to places
like this [King George’s home for the elderly]. But a man is no good on his own.
Agreements are like glue between different shreds of life. As youth, they give you oppor-
tunities; when you are grown, they give you status; and when you are old, they give you
company. You can earn through them and be somebody.’ Mm Jebeh (seventy-nine) nods
and then turns to me to confirm: ‘It is like he says – agreements, my young friend, are for
desire, company, connections and resources.’1
Scholars have long been interested in the ways in which exchanges of goods or
money can strengthen interpersonal relationships and social cohesion. In most
societies this motivates transactions between households and social units during
rites of passage. But it also rings true for individuals engaged in various relation-
ship forms. Indeed, perceptive studies have reiterated the entanglement of
economy and emotion in intimate relationships (see, for example, Bloch 1989;
Luisa T. Schneider is an anthropologist who specializes in the anthropology of violence, intimacy
and law. She holds a DPhil in Anthropology from the University of Oxford which focused on vio-
lence in relationships and the response to it at interpersonal, household, community and state
levels in Sierra Leone. She is now a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social
Anthropology in the Department for Law and Anthropology, where she works on intimacy, violence
and rights among people without housing, institutions and the state. Email: lschneider@eth.mpg.de
1
Certain identifying characteristics have been changed and biographical details omitted to
protect the identity of those who wished to remain anonymous. Research participants chose
their names/pseudonyms.
© International African Institute 2020. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/
licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any
medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of
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Cornwall 2002; Illouz 1997; Zelizer 2000), a liaison that is at the core of the con-
versation above between residents and staff of King George’s home for the elderly.
Researchers now study transactional relationships to normalize sex for money
exchanges and to counter reductive views of prostitution (Hunter 2002) – that
transactional relationships are more than a simple exchange of sex for gifts,
goods or money between individuals, but that they can foster complex and
often lasting engagements. Indeed, scholars agree with Mm Jebeh and Pa
Boima that transactional relationships are incorporated in ‘broader moralities
of exchange’ and redistribution between individuals, generations and kin
(Groes-Green 2014: 237; Cole 2004). Yet, due to a focus on young people
(Stasik 2016), there has been a tendency to overlook the enduring nature of
such transactions and their ability to coincide with marriages. That is not to say
that elders have been ignored altogether. Christian Groes-Green (2013), for
instance, analyses the role of female elders as facilitators of transactions
between young women (donors of sex) and older men (donors of goods and
money). However, research tends to focus on one side of the dyad and to
provide a nuanced but timely analysis of the workings of these relationships at a
specific point in time. This article adds another layer to this rich body of literature
by affirming that transactional relationships are as important among elders – not
solely between elders and youth – as they are among youth. Such relationships
have a life course dimension in that elders, who have engaged in them throughout
their lives, remember the past and navigate the present through them. In Sierra
Leone, agreement relationships are mutually favourable and pleasurable bonds
that play a pivotal role throughout people’s lives. They are transactional relation-
ships fostered through exchanges of goods and services, where sex and compan-
ionship are important and romantic emotions are commonplace. While they are
not permanent, they last longer than a single encounter and vary considerably
in form, duration and level of commitment. Far from following a singular
model, their texture differs as they serve particular purposes at different stages
of a person’s life and thus can shed light on evolving social, emotional and
economic needs. If money changes ownership, this is based on a transparent
negotiation over its purpose and use. The money is a symbolic placeholder for
the ‘thing’ – e.g. fees, information, food or clothes – that is exchanged (Zelizer
2000). Such relationships can be both intragenerational and intergenerational.
The intergenerational dimension also shines through the ways in which elders
teach younger generations how to engage in and manage such relations.
At King George’s home for the elderly, where this study is based, agreement
relationships are lived as passionately and openly as among my younger research
collaborators. The home is run by the Sierra Leone Society for the Welfare of the
Aged and supported by various donors with varying degrees of reliability. Located
on the Grafton/New Regent Road at the east end of Freetown, it provides housing
and basic care to the elderly. The average age of residents is sixty-five years, and,
while I was conducting research there, forty-eight beds were available. King
George’s is the last stop on the life journey of most inhabitants. During the six
years when I was visiting the home, only one resident relocated; all the others
spent their twilight years there.
This article builds on participant observation conducted at the home on
frequent occasions between July 2012 and June 2017. Additionally, I gathered
detailed life and love histories of twenty-three residents – fifteen men and eight
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women – from May 2016 to June 2017. The elders, who were born between the
1930s and 1960s, grew up across the country. They bore witness to Sierra
Leone’s independence, the upsurge of hope at a new direction away from patron-
age and gerontocracy, and the subsequent downwards spiral when aspirations
rubbed against long-trodden routines, mounting precarity and increasing corrup-
tion. They saw long-established rifts widening and experienced their country’s
descent into civil war. They were part of the country’s attempts at refashioning
itself and moving forward in the post-war watershed, and now they are here at
a time when catastrophe and blessing, adversity and success follow hard on
each other. Their diverse lived experiences revealed a common thread in that
they migrated from village settings to the capital, hoping to exit enduring
structures of patronage and live self-directed lives through agreement
relationships. Their objective – to avoid getting absorbed in webs of dependency
and obligation – produced shifting personal and professional circumstances,
which included formal and informal labour and diverse relationship forms. All
had used, and continued to use, agreement relationships strategically to increase
social and economic wealth and to satisfy the desire for company while honouring
the lifelong struggle for self-sufficiency and independence.
Due to this engagement in agreement relationships throughout their lives, the
elders’ narratives offer a lens to examine shifting social relations over the course
of over eighty years. They point to increasing migration to the urban centres
and to a conversion from rural, kin-based relations to more complex, wide-reach-
ing urban networks. In their current, public form, agreement relationships are
urban phenomena. In the capital, they are negotiated openly and are lived in par-
allel to other forms of relationships with spouses, main partners, one-night stands
or providers (Schneider 2018). In rural areas, however, they need to be carefully
concealed. There, kin groups still exert considerable power over intimate relation-
ships. Up until the civil war, wealthy elders married so extensively that they mono-
polized access to women (Richards 2005: 582–8). For younger and less wealthy
men, high bride price payments were often converted into years of unpaid
labour, which increased the ‘wealth in people’ (Bledsoe 1980) of the rich.
Because transactions officially take place between households and are a funda-
mental part of kinship and alliance building, exchanges of intimacy for goods
or money between individuals need to be camouflaged so as not to openly chal-
lenge existing hierarchies. Women’s acquisition of resources from lovers, husbands
and male kin through such transactions takes the form of ‘covert strategies’
(Leach 1994: 198). Their role as public secrets already shone through Melissa
Leach’s anecdote in which one of her male interlocutors scolded her for poten-
tially exposing the fact that women ‘get money from their boyfriends’ (ibid.:
200) when she asked how women acquire resources among the Mende of the
Gola rainforest. Among the Kpelle, such covert transactional relationships were
popular enough to merit their own terminologies, ranging from ‘trial marriages’
to ‘hidden’ or ‘night loving’ (Bledsoe 1980: 92).2 But still, they could never be
recognized officially.
2
In Guinea-Bissau, such transactions were moved outside the village setting as designated love
spaces were created where women had affairs with other men before returning to their marriage
home (Temudo 2019).
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Men and boys who got caught having relations with women and girls outside
marriage received hefty fines that effectively forced them into indentured labour
while sustaining the dominance of powerful lineages (Richards 2005). This
outcome is so popular that it coined the terms ‘women trouble’ and ‘women
damage’, which run through many regional ethnographies (see, for example,
Richards 2005: 578; Bledsoe 1980; Diggins 2018; Ferme 2001; Leach 1994). In
West Africa’s rural farming economies, ‘women trouble’ is thus one consequence
of the uneasy historical relationship between kinship and domestic slavery
(Diggins 2017: 495; Argenti 2010).
The diverse ways in which those confined in this exploitative system sought to
escape the villages and seek alternative livelihoods is well documented. Some
headed to the mining regions for a new start (Dorjahn and Fyfe 1962). Some
were driven into the hands of fighting factions and became ‘protagonists of
war’ (Richards 2005: 585). Others went to the coast and became fisherfolk
instead (Diggins 2018). While agreement relationships, if exposed, bore the possi-
bility of hardship, they also offered potential exit opportunities for both sexes.
Although she did not follow their journeys, during her research in the 1980s,
Mariane Ferme (2001) noted that, among the Mende, women would use such rela-
tions to (temporarily) migrate from their rural homes. Similarly, the elders of King
George’s relied on such relationships to negotiate a move to the capital, where
they hoped for the chance of a self-directed life. The oldest residents at King
George’s, who came to the city to escape patronage and gerontocracy, were
joined by a second wave of newcomers who used agreements to move before the
civil war commenced.
But such relationships not only facilitated migration. They allowed newcomers
to find their feet in the city and to be incorporated into urban networks of reci-
procity. Yet, unlike in other places, in Freetown kin-like patterns were not resur-
rected. In her study of fisherfolk, Diggins shows how, along Sierra Leone’s
maritime coast, runaways quickly forged ‘rhizomorphous’ networks of family
relatedness. These ‘potato-rope families’ incorporated newcomers, but they also
produced webs of hierarchical reliance (Diggins 2017: 493). By contrast, agree-
ment relationships offer an alternative to both aspirational or fictive kin strategies
(McGovern 2012) and fosterage (Bledsoe 1990). Through agreement relationships,
the elders at King George’s lived desire and negotiated social and economic
mobility while maintaining their autonomy and seeking to avoid the underbelly
of dependency and the power imbalances of more hierarchical, kin-like systems.
Furthermore, such relations allowed them to stay connected to wider networks
even when they eventually married. Crucially, these relations continued until
old age, providing connections, income and antidotes to grief and loneliness.
What we have here, then, is a move from tight-knit rural kinship patterns to
diverse urban intimate economies, a move that was facilitated and continues to
be nourished by agreement relationships which moved from concealment to reve-
lation and from stigma to celebration. Transactional relationships are therefore
creative attempts at self-determination through exchanges of intimacy, economy
and emotion between elders, among elders and youth, and between youth. A
key rationale behind the pursuit of agreements is grounded in the idea that a
meaningful life is a connected life. In Sierra Leone, people are not seen as
bounded entities or lone actors, but as links in a pattern of relationships. A rich
life is therefore characterized by connections that give life its pulse and situate a
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person within a web of want and need, give and take. Through agreements, con-
nections can be extended, positionality can be transformed, and solitude can be
evaded. But because a person is embedded in a web of specific relations, agency
is domesticated (see Nyamnjoh 2001 for Cameroon) and sociocentric and egocen-
tric demands constantly compete (Jackson 2012: 7). A person’s unique social and
geographical positionality thereby shapes the forms of connections that are toler-
ated and within reach. Agreements are therefore a balancing act between individ-
ual and collective needs, and their changing role reflects transformations in the
relationship between personal desire and collective responsibility. Their popularity
among elders and youth alike tells a story about forms of resistance to and nego-
tiations of freedom from clearly assigned social positionings and relationship pat-
terns. Through agreements with people who serve as guarantors offering entry to
new geographical locations, social circles and employment opportunities and who
are important companions throughout life’s ups and downs, Sierra Leoneans forge
alternative self-directed life journeys.
Remembering the past through agreement relationships
Rural concealed agreements
The elders’ agreement relationships formed a bridge over their diverse life trajec-
tories. The oldest residents were born in the early 1930s and came of age during a
time when domestic slavery had just been abolished (1928) and many village econ-
omies depended on free labour. During an afternoon at King George’s, some
elders thought back to their first agreements. ‘Well,’ said Pa Mohmo (aged
eighty-eight), carefully:
desire was always there, but back then you had to marry women to be with them. But
bride price was impossible for most of us poor youth. The elders married most of the
young girls who then worked on their farms. They had countless wives. So, either you
worked for free for an elder whose daughter you wanted to earn eventually. Or, you
met her anyways and worked for the elder to pay the fine they gave you when you got
caught. Either way, you worked for the rich men.
To the encouraging laughter of his audience, he continued: ‘Now there was desire.
But there was also tactic. Most of these girls, they liked men their ages. Young men
like us. So, we traded. At night, they brought us certain things we needed, and we
brought them satisfaction.’ Many examples followed Pa Mohmo’s explanation of
how young men and women had exchanged sexual pleasure for goods and items,
for information about harvests and village affairs, for rumours about big men, for
labour and for connections, among other things.
Surprisingly, though, such relations were not merely youthful resistance. Alima
(fifty-five) reiterated: ‘We learned how to get agreements from the old mammies
and the boys from Pa’s. They had many agreements themselves and showed us
how to attract them and how to hide.’ Through the tone of the elders’ various
stories, a complex undercover economy was revealed to me whereby novices –
that is, adolescents – learned from skilled elders how to read the potential connec-
tions in the village, and, by navigating them, how to live out their desires and further
their personal goals and kin-related affairs. Knowledge was passed along gendered
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(women taught women, men taught men) and generational lines (the elders taught
younger generations) but remained restricted to kin and close friends. Many of these
‘agreement seekers’ occupied marginal positions in their respective settings because
they were descendants of slaves, impoverished farmers, adopted strangers
(d’Azevedo 1962) or had come to the village as foster children (Isaac and
Conrad 1982). To small, impoverished households, these relations provided the
chance to surreptitiously boost social and economic resources.
Agreements were carefully guarded by people of the same sex and overlooked
by kin of the opposite sex. While, to the outside observer, village intimacy
seemed like a blanket laid out neatly according to hierarchy and privilege, under-
neath the covers a variety of tactics obfuscated clear boundaries and assigned
places within a social order, all the while leaving the surface image intact.
Indeed, only wealthy husbands and parents, senior wives and chiefs who felt
undermined or threatened by such relations were keen to expose and banish them.
Escaping the village
In the post-independence era, agreement relationships were increasingly moti-
vated by the possibility of escaping the village altogether. The residents at King
George’s explained how the elders in their village tried to better themselves
within the village, but how they themselves looked for ways to leave – as Ma
Yenneh (eighty-five) stated: ‘Connections were limited for us poor people. But
some of the big farmers, because of their many wives and children, they had con-
nections all over Sierra Leone. If you had an agreement with one of these people,
they could create a connection to the city.’ Mabinti (sixty-eight) agreed and, after
a nod to Ma Yenneh, she shared her own story:
I was twelve when independence came. At first, people were celebrating. The poor people
wanted equality. But things did not change. One big man wanted me as his eighth wife. I
was fifteen then. I knew I needed to leave. I had no desire to work hard for nothing all my
life. I needed an agreement to help me out and I found one in one of the chief’s sons.
Under the cover of night and with the support of Mabinti’s mother and grand-
mother, the chief’s son, who spent most of his time studying in Freetown, facili-
tated Mabinti’s escape from the village and arranged her stay in the capital,
where he visited her frequently.
For others, it was the possibility of such agreements that pulled them from the
villages. Pa Jones (eighty-seven), for instance, who was given into fosterage and
raised by distant kin in a village near Bo, explained that:
my aunts were wicked because I was not their child. They beat me without mercy, and I
did all the work while their children relaxed. There was no schooling for me. Few old men
felt sorry for me. They whispered to me that if only I could make it to Bo and find an
agreement then maybe there would be the option for me to go to Freetown and be some-
body. There was no future for me in that village, so I went.
In Bo, Pa Jones started working at a repair garage for vehicles. The mechanic in
charge allowed him to make one of the cars his temporary home, but in turn with-
held most of his salary. Accordingly, Pa Jones continued to be in a marginal pos-
ition, until, aged fourteen, he entered his first agreement relationship.
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There was a mammie next to us – she sold fufu, you know, and I very much like fufu. She
was somewhat older, but very lonely and she liked young boys like me. And these days I
was very hungry. She gave me fufu for free every day and at night I would keep her
company. Because I was very good to her, she always prepared additional treats for me
and I could have become very fat by then [laughs]. I was eating well and had a place
to sleep and wash and she was happy in my company.
Pa Jones learned that this mammie had extensive networks in Freetown, and she
eventually agreed to facilitate his move to the capital and arranged his stay with
one of her older female relatives.
Hence, for these elders, who describe themselves as the ‘independence gener-
ation’, agreement relationships built a bridge of possibility between limited
rural livelihoods and imaginations of the endless possibilities of urban living.
Due to the careful teaching of elders, transactional intimate relations provided,
and continue to provide, a way for young people – both men and women – to
escape confining hierarchies of fosterage, rural patronage, indentured labour or
simply too little freedom to live relationships and relocate. In the post-independ-
ence era, agreements between people who knew both worlds shrunk the previously
insurmountable distance between village and city and made a new start possible.
Navigating the go-slow and fleeing the civil war
In provincial towns, agreement relationships allowed for alternative livelihoods in
an economy that was in a downward spiral. Ma Conteh (fifty-six), who lived in
Koidu, the capital of Kono District in eastern Sierra Leone, summarized:
after independence there was hope. We thought, now power will be in our hands. But no.
Power stayed within the hands of those big men who ate our share during colonialism and
were now mismanaging [our money] worse than ever. Corruption was skyrocketing. Then
we entered go-slow and work stopped. I am telling you as a teacher, without my agree-
ments I would have stayed a beggar before these powerful disgraceful men.
The ‘go-slow’, which started in the mid-1980s, constituted a horrible shared refer-
ence point in divergent life histories. It was a period that characterized the growing
vacuum that opened up after the first decades of independence, a vacuum that
swallowed the Sierra Leonean economy. During the go-slow, people were asked
to go to work but remain unproductive because the resources and structures of
labour had been mismanaged to such an extent that they collapsed. The go-
slow stimulated people’s thoughts about radical alternatives, and, as Mr Kabah
(sixty-six), put it:
there was a breakdown in many social structures, many Sierra Leoneans were saying, ‘If
there will be no war, it will not be nice here.’ ‘If no blood will flow, it will not be nice here.’
Things began moving from bad to worse. Schools and institutions of learning and
working were not working properly. People were going through hard times in their
daily lives. They were particularly angry because there was no democratic means to
change the despotic one-party regime of the APC [All People’s Congress].
Many elders explained how agreement relationships helped them to trade goods
and items in a crippled economy.
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Returning to the villages, agreements offered the possibility of moving further
away from imminent violence. One evening when I was sitting with about
twenty of the home’s residents in the yard listening to their descriptions of how
villages prepared to join one or other fighting faction or defend themselves
against potential attacks, Pa Boima leaned forward in his chair, his warm smile
fleetingly touching everyone’s face before he said:
My brothers and sisters, times were bad. We thought they [politicians] cannot be removed
from power by ballot but by bullet, we were hungry, and we were angry, but is it not true
for many of us, it was our agreements that allowed us to leave our villages before they
started burning? Don’t you see the faces of these agreements when you remember? Me,
for one, when my agreement, Adama, said she had arranged a place for me in the city,
I left my farm and my responsibilities. She saved my life, that agreement, and others
saved my finances in the city.
Tamba (sixty-five) murmured in agreement and said:
In our village they said each family should contribute one [fighter]. It was me they chose. I
had no interest to be part of this war, so I plotted my escape. I made an agreement with
Kumba, who promised to send me to Freetown if I ansa belle [accept responsibility for
causing a pregnancy] for her sister’s baby. I had to leave my wife, my children, everyone.
Only later I could call for them. That is how I escaped fighting.
Many similar experiences were shared during that evening. While the oldest resi-
dents had left the villages through agreements, mostly to escape debt, stagnation
and ‘women trouble’ long before the onset of the conflict, and had navigated
the go-slow through the connections they had built in the city, younger residents
used agreements to flee shortly before the conflict commenced. Salieu (fifty-one),
who was twenty-nine years old when his village started to see the war as inevitable,
said:
I went with the war on my heels. Without my agreement, either, I would have been forced
to take up arms, I would have drowned in the hurt of the struggling villages, or I would
have had a poor and fearful life. Through her, I got a second chance and I could become
somebody.
Becoming somebody in the city
The second key chapter in the life story of agreement relationships included just
that: attempts to ‘become somebody’ away from predetermined pathways. For
most elders, this pursuit brought them to Freetown and lasted until they moved
into the home for the elderly. In Freetown, social standing was no longer pre-
ordained by a person’s position within their lineage and by the position of their
lineage within the social fabric of the village. Gerontocracy and patronage lost
their effectiveness in this wider, more fluid and relational social composition
where social standing was not assigned or fixed but must be achieved and was
subject to change. Now, success depended on the ability to forge connections
beyond the family. Freetown is firmly based on social networks, and a person’s
self-interest is thus in a complicated relationship with the interests of others, just
as it is both enhanced and limited by prospects that arise from interactions.
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Agreements produce ‘durable networks of more or less institutionalized relation-
ships of mutual acquaintance and recognition’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992:
119), and these networks make up the fabric of Freetown’s social matrix. After
arriving in the capital, each newcomer began to set the foundations for such
connections.
Pa Jones did the heavy lifting of firewood and water and carried out repairs
around the house in exchange for a place to sleep. He bypassed the fate of remain-
ing a ‘stranger from the interior’ because his new agreement introduced him to
some of her social circle. Through them, he found work in a shop and was able
to set out to find his place within Freetown’s social matrix. Pa Jones eventually
attended college. Throughout his studies, he had an agreement with Kadiatu, a
woman selling rice from a small stall located on his way to the college. She gave
him his daily lunch and he took her to all the university social events. Their rela-
tionship started and ended on the first and last day respectively of each academic
year. Pa Jones went on to become a teacher. He married Eleanor, a woman he met
in college, and they had four children. Yet, he and his wife continued engaging
openly in agreement relationships alongside their marriage for various purposes.
While Pa Jones’ earlier agreement relationships tended to focus on satisfying
immediate needs, such as food and a place to sleep as well as access to a
specific place or group, Mabinti sought out agreements who brought her one
step closer to realizing her independence and professional success. She used the
money the chief’s son left with her after his visits to ‘get out from under his
wing’ and rented a small self-contained apartment. One of her new neighbours
owned a hair salon, where she became an apprentice. She soon began to do
house calls to cut and style hair, a business that, as she put it, ‘means you know
everybody. One head sends you to another and another and another. In every
place you hear all what goes on in that neighbourhood and you can trade that
information for anything you want.’ Hence, Mabinti embodied the popular
axiom that the key to success in all areas of life is mastery of a wide network of
social connections (subabus) that are so well maintained that they can be mobi-
lized at a moment’s notice (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992). Mabinti strategically
entered agreement relationships in different parts of the city:
I had agreements with men who were very well connected and made them bring me cus-
tomers from that crowd. So, I had an agreement with a policeman and then I did the hair
of the police force, then with a lawyer and then with someone at Aberdeen and Central
and Kissy and Goderich [neighbourhoods in Freetown] and so on. This is how I
expanded my business.
In most cases, Mabinti’s social and economic wealth – and with it her agency –
was multiplied through her agreement relationships and the connections she
forged through them (Piot 1999: 120; Nyamnjoh 2001: 29). Her customer base
grew dramatically and soon she began teaching ‘other ladies the hairdressing
business’.
About a decade later, Mabinti had an agreement with a salon owner who left
her the shop after he retired. Mabinti never married but preferred ‘good
company, freedom and loving’. Her sisters who had remained in the village and
had married there sent their children to stay with her to attend school in
Freetown. ‘I raised many children, I made good money, I had many friends …
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I was never bossed around by nobody’ was how she summarized her life. Mabinti
came to King George’s in 2012, when it became too difficult to conduct household
chores on her own. Two young women she had trained are now continuing her
business. They often visit her at King George’s, as do customers and former agree-
ments. The networks she accumulated are now providing an antidote against iso-
lation at the home for the elderly.
While Mabinti ended up as a hairdresser by chance, Mammie Kaindaneh (MK,
aged seventy-two) set out to Freetown with the specific goal of working as a chef at
one of the big hotels. She was born in a small village near Kono as the youngest of
eight siblings. When only twelve, she convinced one of her uncles to send her to
Freetown to stay with relatives and attend school there. But, like Pa Jones, MK
was not appreciated in her new home and started to look for other opportunities.
‘I learned how to dress properly and quickly the men went all crazy for me,’ she
told me with a smile. At the age of sixteen, she met an older man at a popular
nightclub who showed an interest in her. She soon moved in with him and he
started paying her school fees. They parted ways after she graduated, and she com-
menced an agreement with the chef of one of the catering schools in the Central 2
area in Freetown who allowed her to attend classes for free. In exchange, she intro-
duced him to the networks she had created over the years and was his matchmaker
on numerous occasions. ‘I even introduced this man to his wife. I was very popular
by then and people trusted my opinion,’ she said proudly. When MK accidentally
got pregnant, the chef rejected the pregnancy. MK explained that she needed a
man to claim the pregnancy, ‘show face’ to her family and give the child his
last name so that her and the child’s reputation would not be damaged.3
Josephus, an old schoolfriend, agreed to state that he was the father, as long as
he had no further responsibilities for the child, and MK cooked for him daily
and slept at his place for at least two nights a week.
MK eventually married a man she met at one of the hotels where she worked and
spent more than twenty years with him until he passed away and she came to King
George’s. Her narrative is filled with appreciation for the various men with whom
she entered into agreement relationships, because, as she says, it is due to them that
her dream of becoming a chef was possible, as they allowed her to maintain
independence and control over her own destiny, decisions and life choices.
I was not only someone’s wife. I was a chef, all my life. I provided for all my family. I
found love and raised seven children and I did it all with the help of my agreements,
but it was not their doing, it was mine and I was as important to them as they were to
me. This is a very patriarchal society. Mostly we women have to hide our desires, our
success and our power. But in agreements, you can show openly what you have to
offer, and the person will appreciate you for it because this is the reason you were
chosen in the first place and there is no stigma in that.
Through their agreement relationships, MK and Mabinti forged alternative
paths in the spaces between a priori set gender roles that allowed the realization
of professional aspirations and independent livelihoods. Both in their rural and
3
Even though children out of wedlock are fairly well accepted in Sierra Leone, it is often their
last name that signals whether both parents accept the child (if the child has the father’s last name)
or whether the child has ‘no father’ (and has the mother’s last name).
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urban forms, agreement relationships complicate notions of neat gender parallel-
ism for which Sierra Leone is a central locus (see, for example, Ferme 2001;
Bledsoe 1980; Coulter 2009; Leach 1994). Agreement relationships are as much
a way for young women to move to the city, study or find employment as they
are for older women to enjoy the company of men and offer them access to the
professional or social circles they have created during their lives. The elders at
King George’s and my younger research collaborators shared numerous stories
of older women who were engaged in relationships for sexual pleasures with
young men who hoped to gain financial or social support from them. So-called
‘sugar mammas’ were as popular as ‘sugar daddies’. In Freetown today,
women as well as men can clearly be the facilitators of entry into job markets
and providers of economic resources (Pessima et al. 2009) as well as the recipients
of sexual pleasure.
Navigating the present through agreement relationships
Agreement relationships continue to play a pivotal role at the home for the elderly.
I vividly remember how surprised I was when I learned about the elders’ current
agreements – an astonishment I did not hide well. I was teased about this on
several occasions, as it revealed – as Tamba (seventy-one) put it – my ‘white
woman’s’ assumptions about desire and desirability and about the value of
elders. Indeed, I had assumed that offering intimacy in exchange for goods and
services predominantly constitutes a phase in a young person’s life and that it is
then superseded by other forms of relationships. This was based on two unverified
presuppositions. One was that such relations cannot coexist with other intimate
relationships and are therefore only acceptable at a time when a person has no per-
manent relationships yet or is secretly transgressing acceptable limits. The other
was that sexual desire and desirability are something finite that stop at a certain
point in a person’s life. At the home for the elderly, I was reminded that ‘for agree-
ments you need somebody who has that specific thing that you want. Older people
have more experience, more connections. Mostly they are more valuable.’ To
elders, it was ‘obvious’ that transactional relationships are now more important
to their lives than ever before. Since they rely on exchanges between persons
over time, agreement relationships create multifaceted moral bonds between the
exchanging parties that produce growing chains of connections. Hence, looking
back on a life of agreements means depending on a wide web of connections.
Pa Boima made the following comparison:
You are an anthropologist and with every research you learn more. Would it be reason-
able to stop when you are very good? No, you will keep going as long as you can, and the
more time you have been doing it, the easier it will get and the more you will already
know. And also, you will like it even more with time.
And, indeed, if transactional relationships provide significant human connections
aimed at mutually benefiting, furthering and sometimes realizing personal aspira-
tions without threatening successful masculinity or femininity, why would they be
reserved for young people? Since agreements depend on successfully navigating
social relations and building social capital through time, the elders’ networks
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were at their peak, and ceasing to care for them would have meant a radical
decrease in living standards and level of connectedness. Mrs Finda (seventy-
seven) once explained to me:
For many of us our spouses have passed over and our children are far. But we still like to
have others close. Our desire has not passed yet. We had such relationships all our life;
why should we stop before our brains fade or we ourselves pass over? Stopping now
would break all our connections and leave us all alone and poor.
Crucially, such relations remained important due to the relational conception of a
meaningful life. Not being needed and not needing others, being without meaning-
ful interactions, company or attachments, was understood as an unbearable con-
dition that renders a person’s existence meaningless. Importantly, in this context,
need does not mean dependency, but rather added value. Meaning then arises
from mutually advantageous relationality, from positioning oneself in such a
way that one can add meaning to others and others can add meaning to one’s
own life. At King George’s, agreements build a bridge between life before the
home and life today, and are paramount to the residents’ efforts to continue
leading a meaningful life. As Mr Dumbuya (eighty-six) reiterated:
Maybe we are old, but we are still not dead. Elders are supposed to sit on a busy street
and watch over the happenings. They should be consulted about politics and family
affairs. We are in this nice place, but we are removed. It is our agreements which bring
the city close, make us feel like we are still part of something. Otherwise we could be
on an island far away.
Mm Jebeh (seventy-nine) agreed and said:
The wealth of today are agreements. They are for the romance, they are for the health,
they keep your mind sharp. Nowadays, families are scattered. They are all over. I
don’t even know where my children are exactly at this very moment. But through your
agreements you keep the connections that put you on top of news, of connections, of life.
Agreements allowed elders to stay connected to political and social affairs and to
have relations that transcended the home’s walls, which otherwise feel confining.
The home for the elderly is technically in Freetown, but practically its location is
remote and only a few residents are mobile. The two transport hubs of Jui and
Regent are a drive away and reaching the closest market requires a long walk
along the side of the road. In no way is the home connected to the vibrant and
lively city. When looking outward, one’s view rests on an empty road interrupted
momentarily by speedily passing cars, buses and bikes. On good days, the adjacent
hills stretch out from behind the road, littered with unfinished and seemingly aban-
doned houses. Behind the home, the hill at the foot of which it is built rises up and
the trees close by form an opaque barrier.
Without agreements that connect them to the world outside the home, the resi-
dents would be left mostly in each other’s company. Luckily Haja (seventy-one)
has an agreement with a shop owner from Jui – the closest transport hub – who
visits weekly and supplies her with the newest Nigerian movies in exchange for
her company and a plate of the home’s fufu. One of Mabinti’s agreements is
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from central Freetown and arrives equipped with news of events ranging from
parades to demonstrations and arrests. Pa Mohmo’s agreement lives in one of
the resorts close to Lumley Beach and knows stories about delegations, politi-
cians’ meetings and parties.
When a vehicle stops down by the road, the news of the arrival of a guest spreads
quickly, and any visitors are usually met by a crowd of residents eager to greet
them. A plate of the day’s dish is always kept aside for potential visitors and an
agreement can be sure to meet with many residents keen to learn about the
latest news from Freetown. But intimate togetherness is equally valued.
Agreements often sit in pairs to watch movies – if the electricity supply allows it
– listen to the radio in the shade of a mango tree or disappear into one of the adja-
cent rooms. Another agreement of Mabinti, a man from Piset, usually massages
her feet, while Ma Yenneh and her agreement enjoy playing ludo together.
Managing grief and avoiding loneliness
Agreements also have another therapeutic function in that they provide support as
elders navigate the loss of independent livelihoods that necessarily accompanies
moving to a home for the elderly and that often results from losing one’s
spouse. The following excerpt from my fieldnotes captures this:
Whenever I came to the home, I met Pa Jones sitting under his favourite mango tree, his
gaze resting on the hills, which stretch out in front of us. Usually his lively voice carried
me through the trajectories of his life, invoking pictures of love and loss, of struggle,
failure and success and of a life so full of efforts to make a living. But sometimes Pa
Jones’ narrative suddenly broke and, staring into the green leafy nowhere which lay in
front of us, he seemed so deeply immersed in his own thoughts that my presence was
no longer noticed. I often took this as a sign that our session was over and retreated.
On one occasion, however, I attempted to penetrate the thought-cloud around him,
asking whether he is alright. ‘Yes,’ he eventually responded with a deep sigh and, with
clouded eyes, he continued. ‘Yes, I am hanging on, just hanging on because of my agree-
ment. I don’t know what I would do without her company. She is the one who helps me
through the grief [of losing his wife] and prevents me from being too lonely.’
Pa Jones’ children had brought him to King George’s after Eleanor passed away
in 2007. From one of the nurses at the home I learned that his late wife and his
children had visited King George’s and had chosen to bring him here specifically
so that he could be closer to Hawanatu, a woman selling fish in a nearby market
with whom he had an agreement. This was one of many examples where a spouse
had encouraged such relations. When I voiced my surprise over this and asked if
such relations might ever produce insecurity and jealousy between spouses, Pa
Boima was quick to assure me:
That is a completely different thing. You don’t confuse yebe [a stew] with rice. Rice is the meal
for every day. We Sierra Leoneans say we have not eaten if we had no rice. Well, that is your
husband or wife. But sharing yebe with others is very important during a specific time
[Ramadan]. That is agreements. It makes social bonds stronger, but it is not the same as rice.
Seeing me process this comparison between essential relations and those that add
value, Ma Kema (sixty-seven) contributed her experience:
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My husband and I actually separated because he had an affair with another woman
without telling me. It hurt. How can you cheat? But agreements are different. They are
not hidden. They are not love affairs. You specifically chose to enter a relationship
with that person; you don’t fall in love with someone and cannot help it. It is not acci-
dental, it is conscious.
This differentiation between accidental and deliberate relationships, between
those driven by desire and/or emotion and those strategically and rationally
chosen was repeated many times during my fieldwork. Jealousy is an emotion
that grapples with potential loss. It entwines relations driven by love or lust but
is of marginal importance in openly discussed and tactically chosen agreements.
However, the elders categorized their experience of agreement relationships
amidst marriages and romantic relations as potentially very different to that of
younger generations. ‘We are all jealous people,’ said Ma Yenneh, ‘but agreements
and marriage are very different. You cannot compare, so why be jealous? Young
people’s relationships may be different because things are changing … who
knows what they are doing? But for us, we know the difference very well.’
Returning to Pa Jones, we can now appreciate why his late spouse and children
supported his agreement. Since Hawanatu had known his wife and had been part
of Pa Jones’ life for many years, she connects the life before to the life now. She
made living in the home seem less remote and helped him keep the memories of
his wife close. But she also facilitated Pa Jones’ resocialization within the home
and helped him make new contacts with people living close by. Agreements
provide continuity in life histories characterized by rupture and instability in a
world in flux. On another day, Pa Jones, who had just finished a big plate of
fish balls that Hawanatu had brought for him, stated:
In Africa appreciation goes straight through the stomach [laughs and rubs his belly].
Today, it is the fish woman [Hawanatu] that gets my heart. She reserves the best fish
for me and in turn I provide her with all the stories I collected during my life. We have
an agreement, you know [laughs].
Conclusions: from rural kinship alliances to urban networks
If we examine agreement relations through time, rupture and continuity appear
both in individual biographies and in Sierra Leone’s social trajectory. First
learned from elders in the rural areas, agreements end up pulling people from
the villages, transform in the urban field and rekindle relations with the villages
later on. Transactional relationships do different things for people at different
stages of their lives. Overall, they facilitate forms of interactive becoming in
which others help personal attempts to become somebody and stay somebody.
They offer youth the possibility to leave their (rural) homes and develop an idea
of who they want to be and how they want to live independently of the expecta-
tions or the carved-out paths of their kin.
Agreement relationships facilitate migration to places where migrants do not
have established ties and help kickstart their attempts to seek new beginnings
there. Because both men and women engage in agreements to relocate, the
Sierra Leonean case complements work on the reliance on intimate relationships
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to facilitate migration (e.g. Neveu Kringelbach 2016) and adds gendered texture
to research exploring how transactional relationships foster women’s rural–
urban migration (Groes-Green 2013) as well as the cross-border migration of
both women (e.g. Groes-Green 2014; Venables 2008) and men (Ebron 1997;
Meiu 2009). In the structures of informality and networking that are the pulse
of many cities in the postcolonial world, those who are without social webs that
can be tapped can experience difficulties navigating social and economic terrains.
Agreements can serve as first points of contact and as guarantors who facilitate
entry to specific and restricted circles and allow those engaged in them to learn
how to steer through complex socio-economic landscapes. In so doing, they
provide an option besides forging ‘fictive’ kin relations (McGovern 2012) or
relying on fosterage, which has often been a source of hardship and inequality
(Bledsoe 1990).
As consumption and production intersected in their various entanglements, the
elders at King George’s first prioritized their individual choices, against those of
their kin, but through the ‘things’ they offered they simultaneously contributed
to the satisfaction of the material, emotional and sexual needs of companions
beyond the family. Urban life allows transactional relationships that had to be
carefully concealed in rural areas to be lived openly and amplifies the way in
which the exchange of goods and services fosters social alliances and contributes
to a reciprocal economy of desire. In the capital, the overt practice of such rela-
tionships is an outcome of a system of sociality in which relations equal social
capital, and where the wider one’s networks the greater one’s possibilities.
Today, agreement relationships are intrinsic to city living. In the gap that
opened between previous rural models and possible futures, desire can be experi-
mented with more freely since access to women is no longer restricted to marriage.
Once runaways, adults who ‘became somebody’ in the city provide an invalu-
able resource for rural kin and formally severed ties are often revitalized.
Adults’ and elders’ stable urban networks nourish both rural and urban kin,
and, as people and resources are sent back and forth, durable bonds are forged
across the country.
If properly cared for, connections deepen with the passage of time, and the older
a person the wider their networks. After retirement and in old age, transactional
relationships offer a safety net through which elders continue to ‘earn’. Less
than 1 per cent of Sierra Leoneans receive a pension (Pension Watch 2019) and,
as we learned, kin may be scattered and unwilling or unable to offer support. In
the autumn of life, transactional relations allow a person to stay connected to
everyday urban affairs and maintain established interpersonal relations. They
provide solace when spouses pass away, children are distant and physical limita-
tions lead to increasing dependency on others. In so doing, they allow an escape
from, or at least lessen, the loneliness that is an uneasy companion of old age
for many, and that is particularly starkly felt in homes for the elderly.
Before they pass away, elders share their knowledge about the subtle art of navi-
gating life with agreement relationships, just as they themselves once learned from
their elders, and, as networks, employment opportunities and strategies are passed
down to younger companions, oral history remains central to urban sociality and
intergenerational knowledge transfers.
The elders’ narratives reveal the ebbs and flows of a complex nexus of exchanges
that intermesh with sexual, emotional and affective encounters around notions of
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